new work, now in the press. She has written out, as you will observe, my Peter, and this is, I suspect, the last thing she will do before the new birth. Affectionately yours, My Dear Friend, P. B. S. [In regard to Shelley's pen-name of Miching Mallecho (spelt Malicho in the Shakespeare folio of 1623), it may be well to note that the term is explained by Shakespeare commentators as meaning lurking mischief,-the old English verb to mich (or skulk) being still in use in the provinces (as in Devonshire) to signify specially playing truant from school, and malicho being borrowed from the Spanish malhecho-misdoing; but why not from malico, diminutive of malo? It ought not to be necessary to inform the reader that the stanza given as a motto on the opposite page is really by Wordsworth; but as Mr. Rossetti has stated that it is "not to be found" in Wordsworth's Peter Bell, and presumes "that the real author's name is 'P. B. Shelley,'" I am constrained to clear Shelley of that charge by recording that the stanza is to be found in Wordsworth's poem, if we look in the editions which, alone, Shelley can possibly have seen when he wrote his poem,-namely the first and second. I do not think it reappeared in later editions. The only important liberty Shelley seems to have taken with it is the suppression of a note of interrogation at the end of the first line, and the introduction of the long pause before damned. The impression of drollery made on Shelley's mind by Wordsworth's Poem does not seem to have worn off immediately; for after the composition of The Witch of Atlas in August 1820, we find him, in his Lines "to Mary," concerning that poem, again jocular at the expense of Wordsworth.-H. B. F.] PETER BELL THE THIRD. BY MICHING MALLECHO, ESQ. Is it a party in a parlour, Crammed just as they on earth were crammed, But, as you by their faces see, All silent, and all- -damned! Peter Bell, by W. WORDSWORTH. OPHELIA. What means this, my lord? HAMLET.-Marry, this is Miching Mallecho; it means mischief. DEDICATION. SHAKSPEARE. TO THOMAS BROWN, ESQ., THE YOUNGER,1 H.F. DEAR TOM, Allow me to request you to introduce Mr. Peter Bell to the respectable family of the Fudges; although he may fall short of those very considerable 1 The nom de plume under which Tom Moore published The Twopenny Post-Bag and The Fudge Family. Mr. Garnett suggested to Mr. Rossetti that "H. F." is meant to stand for Historian of the Fudges. This seems likely. personages in the more active properties which characterize the Rat and the Apostate, I suspect that even you, their historian, will confess that he surpasses them in the more peculiarly legitimate qualification of intolerable dul ness. You know Mr. Examiner Hunt; well-it was he who presented me to two of the Mr. Bells. My intimacy with the younger Mr. Bell naturally sprung from this introduction to his brothers. And in presenting him to you, I have the satisfaction of being able to assure you that he is considerably the dullest of the three. There is this particular advantage in an acquaintance with any one of the Peter Bells, that if you know one Peter Bell, you know three Peter Bells; they are not one, but three; not three, but one. An awful mystery, which, after having caused torrents of blood, and having been hymned by groans enough to deafen the music of the spheres, is at length illustrated to the satisfaction of all parties in the theological world, by the nature of Mr. Peter Bell. Peter is a polyhedric Peter, or a Peter with many sides. He changes colours like a cameleon, and his coat like a snake. He is a Proteus of a Peter. He was at first sublime, pathetic, impressive, profound; then dull; then prosy and dull; and now dull-O, so very dull! it is an ultralegitimate dulness. You will perceive that it is not necessary to consider Hell and the Devil as supernatural machinery. The whole scene of my epic is in "this world which is". -so Peter informed us before his conversion to White Obi -The world of all of us, and where We find our happiness, or not at all. Let me observe that I have spent six or seven days in composing this sublime piece; the orb of my moon-like genius has made the fourth part of its revolution round the dull earth which you inhabit, driving you mad, while it has retained its calmness and its splendour, and I have been fitting this its last phase "to occupy a permanent station in the literature of my country."1 Your works, indeed, dear Tom, sell better; but mine are far superior. The public is no judge; posterity sets all to rights. Allow me to observe that so much has been written of Peter Bell, that the present history can be considered only, like the Iliad, as a continuation of that series of cyclic poems, which have already been candidates for bestowing immortality upon, at the same time that they receive it from, his character and adventures. In this point of view I have violated no rule of syntax in beginning my composition with a conjunction; the full stop which closes the poem continued by me, being like the full stops at the end of the Iliad and Odyssey, a full stop of a very qualified import. Hoping that the immortality which you have given to the Fudges, you will receive from them; and in the firm expectation, that when London shall be an habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo-Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary 1 There is far more point in this paragraph than the mere quotation (or mis-quotation) of Wordsworth's words about a "permanent station &c. The real joke is that Shelley has been but six or seven days in making good his claim to immortality, while Wordsworth owns to a lapse of nineteen years between the first and final preparation of his Peter. In the dedication of it to Southey he says: "The Tale of Peter Bell, which I now introduce to your notice, and to that of the Public, has, in its Manuscript state, nearly survived its minority;-for it first saw the light in the summer of 1798. During this long interval, pains have been taken at different times to render the production less unworthy of a favourable reception; or, rather, to fit it for filling permanently a station, however humble, in the Literature of my Country." stream, some transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism, the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and their historians, I remain, dear Tom, Yours sincerely MICHING MALLECHO. December 1, 1819. P.S.-Pray excuse the date of place; so soon as the profits of the publication come in, I mean to hire lodgings in a more repectable street. |